War Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 5) by Aaron Ritchey (find a book to read TXT) 📗

the world had assigned me. Suddenly, I wanted a drink, and I wanted to load up my vape with enough Rebel Leaf that I’d smoke my brain right past Mars and right to the moons of Jupiter.

But I’d promised Pilate. Never again.

Everyone waited for me to speak. I ended up shrieking. “I already apologized to that jackering crybaby. And yeah, I’m jackering insane, but there wasn’t another option. If we would’ve stolen the Moby outright, the Heartbreaker would’ve gunned us down. I had to empty this Bobby before I could steal it. It was the only way.”

I could’ve said all that without cussing, but something in me wanted to scream at them instead of crying. I could feel the bubble of emotion deep down. I didn’t want it. Not ten minutes earlier I’d been begging Pilate to help me feel and now I didn’t want any of it.

“Say what you will,” Pilate said, “but Cavatica’s plan worked. It’s a shame about Peeperz and the Moby, but we all know in combat, the big moral decisions become impossibly muddled. She did the best she could, and her best got us out of Burlington.”

Before anyone could say another word, Jen Baptista started chuckling. We were all so shocked, we listened to it for several long moments. It reminded me of Pilate’s laughter when Sharlotte told us about the medical report that said our father wasn’t viable and that Pilate was my real father.

We didn’t need to ask what Baptista was laughing about. She told us straight up. “You guys are terrible terrorists. A teenage girl, a wheezy priest, and these two.” She jerked her head at Sketchy and Tech. “You have no idea how much propaganda we were force-fed on the Juniper terrorists. Even Mavis Meetchum, and that was the funniest. I read her poetry in high school and every interview she ever did. I couldn’t wait to see the Juniper, and I knew there would be fighting, but I never thought I would find myself fighting the Wellers and Father Pilate.”

Quite a speech and I had no idea what to say about any of it. Me? A terrorist? And her love for Mavis Meetchum? I’d read some of her poems as well, but I liked her essays better. Mavis put into words what we all felt about the strange grandeur of the Juniper. If she was a terrorist, then so was Jesus H. Christ. The “h” is for happy, according to Pilate’s bizarre theology.

It did make me feel better. We might not have to shoot Baptista after all. Thank God for small mercies.

Sketchy turned her head to gape at the soldier girl with a dumb expression on her froggy face. “What?”

Baptista smiled. “You guys have probably never watched an episode of Lonely Moon, but I’m a big fan. It’s a family drama about competing ranching families in the Juniper. I’ve binged every season at least five times.”

Pilate also cocked his head. “What?”

“I’ve seen the show,” I said. “It’s all so clean and nice and happy even when it tries to get edgy. It can’t capture the Juniper, but it sure does try.”

“I knew it wasn’t real when I signed up, but damn, I thought it would be something similar. It’s not. What is this all about? Why steal this zeppelin? From what I heard, Sketchy and Tech were going to be taken to the refugee camps and re-patriated.”

“Camps,” Pilate said. “It makes them sound so nice. I wonder if the Nazis told the Jews they were just taking them camping.”

“It’s not like that,” Baptista said.

“Uh huh,” Pilate said, clearly unconvinced.

I walked in front of the windows and stared at the clouds. It was time to come clean with everyone about everything.

“I have nineteen days to find a secret ARK facility in the Juniper or Tibbs Hoyt will kill my friends. I figure there’s only one person in the world who might know where the ARK base is. And he’s in Denver, or on his way.”

“Jack Kanton, the former president,” Baptista said. “You told me. And he is coming. He’ll be in Denver in six days for St. Patrick’s Day. Some kind of a publicity stunt, though some of my friends thought his visit wasn’t about the peacekeeping mission. It was about something else.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“They say it’s about Hereford Gold. Since we’ve disrupted the Juniper cattle industry, people are paying twenty dollars a half-kilo for Hereford Gold, the same cows your family marched across the Juniper to Nevada. The amount of money is staggering.”

I did the math quickly. “That’s ten times the price Sysco promised us. We didn’t get all three thousand beefsteaks to Wendover...we lost about five hundred. But if you’re serious and it’s forty dollars a kilo, that’s sixty million dollars for twenty-five hundred cows. And that’s all going into Howerter’s pocket, I’ll bet.”

Made me remember my history class on the Iraqi wars, but instead of oil, it was about steaks. Ironic.

“Taste the adventure? They can kiss my ass,” Pilate quipped.

“It’s a lot of money,” Baptista continued, “but more and more, I’m thinking it’s not about the beef. If the ARK does have something to hide, if there is some kind of mutant fallout from their secret experiments, who better to help hide that than the U.S. military? And President Swain’s numbers have been falling. Her coming into the Juniper, advertising herself during the Lonely Moon episodes, it’s all too convenient.”

Again, I was speechless. What was going on with our prisoner? Was she trying to manipulate us? Her life was on the line, and she might be telling us what we wanted to hear, but that didn’t feel right. And she was saying words that were obviously well thought out.

She saw the quizzical look on my face. “Listen, Cavatica, I’m not going to follow orders blindly. I’m a U.S. soldier, sure, but I’m also human and I have a brain. I come from generations of military service, and all of us were proud to serve, but we were